Key facts
- Delangue wrote on X that the departure was a really sad day and that Hugging Face would keep fighting for open-source AI.
- Nvidia's plan to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion was announced in September and is scheduled to close in the first half of 2027.
- Reuters reported in October that the US Department of Justice began inquiring how the deal would affect AI competition.
- Nvidia said the platform would preserve open support, while the deal would give Nvidia control of a major AI model distribution channel.
- Requests for comment on the deal status and on talks with Nvidia interim CEO Collette Kress were not returned.
Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue said on November 12 that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's departure made it a sad day and that his company would keep fighting for open-source AI. Delangue made the comment in a post on X, writing that the situation was one he wished had not happened.
Nvidia announced in September a plan to acquire Hugging Face, the platform for open-source AI models, for $12.9 billion. The report described it as the second-largest acquisition in Nvidia's history, behind its $20 billion purchase of chipmaker Groq's assets in December 2025. The deal is still scheduled to close in the first half of 2027.
Reuters reported in October that the US Department of Justice had begun making inquiries about how the acquisition would affect competition in the AI market. Nvidia said the platform would preserve open support, while the deal would also let Nvidia control a major distribution channel for AI models.
Requests for further comment on the deal status and on whether Hugging Face has spoken with Nvidia interim CEO Collette Kress were not returned.
The report said Huang had been a prominent advocate for open-source and open-weight AI. In July he published an AI policy letter as his first post on X, signed by 25 companies including Microsoft, Meta, Hugging Face, IBM and Palantir, urging the US government not to over-restrict open-weight models. In August, Nvidia announced a $6 billion deal with coding startup Poolside to help build an open AI ecosystem in the US, The Wall Street Journal reported. Last month, Nvidia expanded its Nemotron family of open-weight models with a 120-billion-parameter model for enterprise agents and two lightweight Bolt models that run on PCs.